Month: November 2017

It’s not yet midday and today is already a wonderful example of what it means to wear a lot of hats in your work.

This morning I’ve edited images, downloaded videos, uploaded those videos to youtube and facebook along with titles, description, tags and links (very important), fixed a couple of bugs in the code for our public website around videos, chased up our IT company about a ticket or two (particularly making clear the need to heartbeat communication at each step of a ticket’s lifespan), been on the phone helping set up a new employee, generating some lists of data for that new employee to start working on, worked on my two inboxes trying to get them a little cleaner (am a zero inbox guy) and have started to have a look at what I was really supposed to do today.

But that’s just it hey.

When you wear a lot of hats, what you are “supposed” to do is wear those hats. What you _plan_ to do (which is important, no doubt) is often not what happens. The old “no plan survives contact …” saying.

It’s hard, because those of us for whom structure and process is important, well when we make plans with our many hats, it’s hard to then work through that our plans aren’t happening the way they were supposed to.

But the world is broken. The second law of thermodynamics points to this, that entropy increases.

It’s easy to sometimes think that planning then is useless.

I’ve been eight years now in my current many-hat work, and we have been militant in our planning, but also we have worked hard to be flexible rather than brittle.

And it has paid off. Our system has seen the benefit of planning over the long-term – Because while sometimes our plans don’t go as we think, sometimes they do. And sometimes the plans change a little.

And sometimes after a few days/weeks/months we come back to the plan and realise it was stupid anyway.